9223788 Walpole Supporting Predictable Latency and Throughput in Large Storage Systems This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. This research is concerned with the design of storage systems that can hide the latency associated with accessing high-capacity distributed storage and hence support guaranteed latency and throughput. The main objectives of the project are to (1) define new storage system interfaces that allow quality-of-service and synchronization requirements to be passed to the storage system; (2) define a storage system architecture that can use this information to hide storage access latency; and (3) implement a prototype latency-hiding storage system. The principle method underlying the latency-hiding storage system is prefetching, which is based on information gathered from applications through the storage system interfaces described above. A storage system with these characteristics will significantly reduce the burden on programmers of multimedia applications, particularly those based on stored audio and video, and will help to facilitate the development of multimedia computing in large-scale systems. ***
